One I tell him is the vision that Robert, the jongleur, had when we were under siege in Montségur, and we laugh so hard I think I’ll pee—flying castles and boats that swim underwater, haywagons that roll themselves along without an ox or horse! Such fantasies. Only of course I don’t mention Montségur. I just say a man I knew had visions of the Future, and I leave out all the rest.
It was early in the siege, when our spirits still rode high. We gathered after supper in the dungeon, men and women both, to entertain ourselves.
One night Robert came forward, our self-proclaimed entertainer—juggler and jester, troubadour, clown, musician. He struck three chords on his lute to quiet us, but silence took some time to fall over us, with everyone talking and ignoring him. He stood in his absurd parti-colored hose, one leg thrust forward and the toes of his stockings curling up in the air like two scorpion tails. He knew he looked funny. His beard was jagged and thin, and he had a little round belly above thin, shambly legs, and a more ridiculous figure in his diamond-patterned hose you could not find.
Some of us hushed the others and shouted that we would have a song, if they’d shut up. Others taunted him, already laughing and ready for his asshole wit. He struck his instrument a flurry of chords, like rabbits running for cover—and stopped.
We waited expectantly.
“Last night I had a vision,” he said in a low, flat voice. We laughed. We thought he was making fun of the Good Men’s meditations.
“Listen!” he shouted. (Strum-strum-strum.) Then he did a backward somersault while holding his instrument, and we applauded gaily. (Strum-strum-strum.)
“Last night I had a vision of a Future-time. Now be quiet, and I’ll tell the future for you.” A murmur ran through the hall, and we all settled down, for who alive doesn’t want to know the future, whether a young girl wanting to marry or a man questing for a prize? What we wanted to know was when the Count of Toulouse would send his reinforcements and defeat the French forces that encircled us.
But to our surprise, he said, “Last night an angel came to me.” The room grew still. We did not laugh. His face lifted, radiant with the memory. “He was surrounded by light and dressed in brilliant white, and from his head came spears of light. I was awed and filled with joy.
“‘Come,’ he said, ‘and I will show you the Future-time.’
“I hesitated. ‘Are you demon or angel?’ I asked. ‘I follow only those who follow Jesus Christ, our Lord.’
“‘Then you may come with me,’ said this beautiful creature. ‘For I too worship the Light of the World.’”
Robert paused, and his face took on a glorious, distant aspect, as if he were peering into inner realms. Then he looked down at his instrument, remembering. “You will tell me I am lying.” He glanced up joyously. “But this was given me, just as I’m describing to you. The angel held out his hand to me, and when I took it, I was pulled upward, spiraling out of my body to I-know-not-where, and there I saw the marvels I shall describe. I know only this: it was not another world, but this very land we live on now, and years ahead.”
“Tell it!” we called impatiently. Now his strumming changed to plaintive melodies, the kind that tug mysteriously at the heart, and from that plangent melancholy he moved gradually to gayer, quicker tunes, until his voice broke in full and strong.
“I saw a time of such prosperity” (strum-strum-strum) “as you cannot conceive,” he said. “Both men and women were dressed in gaudy foreign clothes of soft fabrics and rich colors. Never has human eye seen such tissue, thin as Oriental silk and yet so warm that people wore neither over-garments nor thick underclothes.
“They were standing in great crowds on a black path in the high-ceilinged hallway of a palace—and then I saw that the floor was moving, and they moved with it, and no one had to walk, because in those days the roads will do the walking for them!” (Strum-strum-strum.)
We burst out laughing, hooting and calling, delighted by the thought of moving roads. He pretended huffiness, but he was pleased withal.
“But I saw more!” he shouted; and when we had stopped hooting him and had quieted down again, he held up one hand for absolute silence, and again he strummed his lute.
“I saw castles that soared through the air with a sound like a hundred waterfalls, a sound like the thunder of an army’s hooves, a sound like an earthslide. And I saw the faces of people at the windows looking out. They could fly from here to the Holy Land between dawn and noon. They ate their dinners in these flying houses, and—I swear—with everyone at ease. They read books as they flew through the air!”
Some of us laughed even harder. But we were fascinated. “Where will they go, these flying castles?” called out one woman.
“Anywhere you desire, little heart. You make a wish and you are whisked into the air and set down leagues away. A time will come when these things happen, for I have seen them, as in a dream.”
“I dreamt I married a queen,” croaked an old man, “but it doesn’t mean it’s come to pass!”
“Don’t give up!” chimed a voice from the back. “You’re not dead yet.”
But Robert paused, his head cocked to one side. His eyes trailed thoughtfully to the farthest left-hand corner of the room, lost in sweet memory.
“This was not a dream,” he said quietly, so quietly indeed that he caught our attention. “There is a difference between a knowing and a wish, between a vision and a dream. This was given to me, like seeing through a crack in the curtains of time.”
He looked down wistfully, a little smile playing on his lips, and he plucked on his pretty instrument a watery river of soft chords, gentle and nostalgic.
Suddenly he bellowed. “I saw more!” (Strum-strum-strum.) “In addition to the moving floor and the flying castles, these people have carts as high as haywagons that race each other on their roads, carrying people inside.”
“And so do we have carts!” shouted one man.
“Are these roads moving too?” asked another.
“But I tell you,” answered Robert, “these are drawn by neither ox nor horse. They push themselves along with noisy growls, howls, screams, and roaring breath. I tell you, in this Future no one walks.”
We loved it! How we laughed. It made a happy evening, and for days the children and even hardened soldiers, weary with the fighting, would stand and pretend the ground was moving them along, or that they were climbing into a flying tower that would soar over the walls and over the enemy troops in the valley below. The flying castles would pour boiling pitch onto the Crusaders, and buckets of fire, and then fly on to set us down in the Holy Land of Christ.
“What else?” someone called.
“I saw boats shaped like the fishes of the seas. They had no sails.” (Strum-strum-strum.) “They did not travel on top of the water, pushed by the good Lord’s wind—”
“They flew through the air!” shouted a young wit.
“No!” He silenced the heckler with a look. “They dove under the waves and swam like cormorants under the water, diving and coming up for air.”
We didn’t like this as well as the moving roads and the flying houses. For myself, it made me uncomfortable to think of swimming underwater in that way.
“Why?” someone called. “What was the point?”
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I understood the roads and the air-houses. But going underwater—perhaps it was to escape an enemy. Perhaps to catch a fish. I’m merely telling you what I saw.”
“How did they see underwater?” someone asked.
“Blindly,” came the answer from across the hall. “The saltwater in their eyes.”
After that, every few nights Robert told us of new visions that he had. Or else that he made up. Once he said these people could talk to one another across great distances, their voices carried from Paris to Rome. They only had to think, it seemed, and messages would fly like castles through the air, only fast as thought—not lumbering like stones. He told us of many strange things—
how rich will be this world, and without the classical distinctions between men and women, peasant, soldier, servant or lord.
We argued that: “How would you tell your place? How would you know to whom to bow?”
The dress alone, the night he talked more of that, kept us occupied for hours.
Another night he said there’ll be no more disease: no lepers, no plague or pox or children dying of the cough; and I remember afterward the little hunchback cripple Esclarmonde de Perella, daughter of our commander, who had already taken the robe, poor crippled girl—how she crept to the jongleur’s stippled side. She put one trusting hand on his patched leg and looked up in his face. “And do they have hunchbacks and dwarves in this Future?” she asked.
Robert looked sadly down at her on her wooden crutch. “I don’t know,” he said.
His visions did not come on call whenever he wanted one but captured him unexpectedly. Was he lying?
One day I approached him in the yard. “Master Robert.”
He was leaning against the wall, watching nothing, which was what we did much of the time during the boredom of the siege. He pulled himself up straight and touched his cap to me courteously. “Na Jeanne.”
“I have a question.” I searched his eyes. “Are they true, these tales you are telling? Are you making them up?”
He regarded me solemnly. “Jeanne, I’m telling you only what I’ve seen. I don’t know if they are true or my imagination. But I believe I am being shown a Future-time, for I haven’t wit enough to think of something like that. Even so, it doesn’t concern us—does it?—for we shall never live to see it.”
“No.” I sighed, pleating my skirt unhappily between my fingers. “No, but I like to think it real. They must be so happy in that future age.”
One night he spoke weeping about the weapons and wars, for now the visions had turned dark.
“They have stone-guns so powerful that when a missile hits, it explodes in a wall of flame. There is fire everywhere, and the roar of their weapons is like the noise of the flying castles. The earth trembles. Thousands are killed in the thunder of one blow—women, children, soldiers, babes.”
“Women and children?” we cried in horror. “The citizens and peasants too?”
“Everyone and everything is killed. The landscape is desolate and bare. Craters of mud.”
“But who will till the land?”
“That’s not right!” cried one fierce soldier. “War is a profession. It has strict rules. It’s not directed at civilians.”
“We farmers may not know that,” Jerome interrupts me. “The knights ride across our plowed fields; the soldiers steal and burn our crops. May God help anyone who lives in an army’s path.”
He’s right, of course. Didn’t Montfort burn the crops wherever he went? And weren’t towns destroyed and didn’t famine wrack the land?
I shake my head at the memory. “I know.”
Indeed, that night at Montségur we argued about this harsher kind of war, with some people crying out that what’s the point of winning if everything’s destroyed? I remember how that night I crawled to bed filled with the terror of Robert’s Future-time. It made me grateful to live in my own time, even under siege, rather than in those years when the stone-guns will belch out walls of living flame and thousands will be burnt alive by one stone alone. For that one night, I felt safe under the rain of the French Crusaders’ rocks, because they could not clear the walls or explode in fireballs.
But then came Robert’s final vision—and our patience snapped. That last evening he was pleased with himself. He strutted proudly up and down. The notes of his music chased one another in a merry hunt and drew colors in the air, dissolving and reappearing, until he smashed them to a stop with a slap to the side of the instrument.
“Listen to me,” he announced, as pleased and proud as a lord. “In that time there will be no more darkness, for people will create light by a wave of their hand. Like gods they will turn night into day! In that time, both day and night will be the same, for there is light all the night long.”
It was too much for us. The crowd turned on Robert. He had to flee for his very life. They stripped his clothes off his back, punching, biting, kicking, for God alone can create light. Everyone knows this. Light was the first creation of God on the First Day, when he commanded, “Let there be light,” and there was light, and God separated the light from the darkness and called the light Day and the darkness he called Night—and what would these poor people do with their very souls at stake, defying the rules of God?
Then bitter fights broke out, with even our perfecti (who up till then had listened as delighted as the rest) joining in. Some pointed out that we have fire now, which gives off light and heat and is ignited by striking flint on flint. But others said that fire was God’s gift. Still others disbelieved the prophecy altogether, while some broke out in angry protestations, asking when servants would sleep if denied the balm of night, or peasants halt their labor in the fields? How would we know when war could stop without sweet-tempered, starry night, or the wounded be carried off the field and tended to? And what of the stars and moon? Would they grow pale and die without their nightly exercise?
Robert limped for weeks. After that he had no more visions, or if he did, he would no longer tell us them.
“Do people in that time still die?” asks Jerome, going back to digging at his leather with an awl. His question is as innocent as little Esclarmonde’s: cat-curious.
“Yes,” I answer. “Robert said they grow old and die, just as we do now. But some live to three-and fourscore years and more, because the babies rarely die.”
“So it’s crowded!”
We had thought that too.
“Is it as crowded as at Montségur?” someone had called out, and a ripple had run through the termite-hive of that room as we’d considered that Future-time to come, when no one would die until extreme old age (except by the fire of the stone-guns). A nightmare, you would think.
But they’ll have creams to soften their skin; and now, I glance in the flickering firelight at Jerome, head bent over his work, and think how I would like to have a cream for my raw, wind-burnt face and hands, which once were soft as the tapestry silk with which we sewed. Everyone will have water to bathe in, without cutting wood for the fires to heat it in, or traveling miles to the hot springs.
Oh, there is nothing you can think of they won’t have in that Future-time!
“I don’t believe a word,” says Jerome, stroking the gray cat, which has leapt up and curled right on the leather in his lap.
“No, nor I,” I reply. “Though I suppose if you have roads that move you without effort and castles that fly through the air, if you have no disease, and all the creams and clothings of that Golden Age, then perhaps you wouldn’t mind living so long. Especially if your friends lived too. But it would be hard,” I finish, “if they all died while you could still creep about.”
He looks at me sharply, alerted by the catch in my throat.
I lie, eyes open, on my storeroom bed. The room smells of sweat and leather, of strings of onions and garlic, and most prominently of earth (for the walls were dug out of the hillside, or rather formed by digging into the hill). The mattress is thin and my cloak serves as a blanket, but it’s not for discomfort that I stay awake. I keep hearing Jerome’s words: “He doesn’t sound so fine a man to me.”
How do you tell one man about another? The pictures rise like bubbles behind my eyes, like jewels: William’s blue eyes flashing with excitement as we planned a daring raid, his face washed by moonlight and only inches above my own when we made love, and then his mouth at my ear as he moves gently inside me: Jeanne Jeanne Jeanne Jeanne Jeanne. He whispers my name again and again as we make our baby girl, and my body is rising to meet his, my arms around his back, my fingers in his thick hair, our legs entwined, and my back is arching under his hands, our lips so sweetly meeting, William taking little sips of me—of lips and neck and arms—tasting my
skin with his tongue, sucking on my breasts and providing pleasure so exquisite that no one could believe it wrong, not even God himself, who presented Eve to Adam in the Garden and whose Son blessed at Cana the wedding ceremony that would result in these delights. I am coming—oh, ecstasy!—and come again, and once again, while he, still in control, moves softly above me, in and out. His face is pale in the moonlight, eyes open, watching me. I lick my lips and close my eyes, falling into his embrace, his scent. He pulls out so far that only the tip is teasing the lips to the entry of my secret cave, tantalizing, circling the precious entry; and “No!” I cry and plunge him back inside, and soon he begins to thrust, faster and firmer, while a throaty growl fills my ear. I rise to meet his passion, crying “Yes!” and I can feel him splash against my deepest part and William’s cry and afterward a series of short, spasmodic jerks as he squeezes himself dry.
William drops his weight on me, heavy in my arms. I stroke the hard, flat muscles of his back, still resonating, upswept, in transport. We are one mind, one heart, one body. He is slipping out of me. Juices oozing down my thigh. He has fallen asleep on top of me.
Gradually I slide out from under him. Still sleeping, he rolls onto his back, and I creep in close and rest my cheek on his heart. I can hear the strong, even drumbeat of his soul. His face is as tender and vulnerable as a teenager’s. White moonlight fills the corners of the room, casting a pallor over William’s face and his bare chest.
“You are filled with light,” he told me once. “I feel as if I’m drinking up light when I lie with you.”
William sleeps and I smile, because I know he’s just given me his baby, and I sit up on one elbow, admiring him while I can, because soon he will have to depart, and I can’t bear to waste one moment lost in sleep. I have so little precious time to watch his face, to trace the line of his jaw, to memorize his lips.
The Treasure of Montsegur Page 17